Alexander Rovt insists I join him in smoking a cigar as soon as we settle into an interview at his 11,400-square-foot town house on Manhattan’s East 63rd Street. All the better, perhaps, to appreciate the cognitive dissonance.

Sipping takeout cups of coffee that we place coaster-less on an ornately carved antique coffee table, I notice portraits of Napoléon’s family frowning down upon a man who is a substantial 6 feet 2 inches. “This is my favorite room,” says Rovt in booming, Slavic-tinged English. He gestures toward the parlor’s gold-leaf-encrusted walls in a room that overlooks a patio with heated marble tiles—all part of a four-year, $18 million renovation.

“I like freedom, and I don’t like anyone telling me what to do,” he says with a shrug. “So I figured, if I buy myself a building, I can smoke wherever, whenever I want.” Liberty and over-the-top opulence: the rewards of amassing $1.2 billion in net worth from fertilizer.

Entirely self-made, Rovt, 59, had hardscrabble beginnings. He was born to poor Jewish parents (his father, a manager at a knitting factory; his mother, a housewife) in Carpathia, a western region of Ukraine that fell into the hands of the Hungarians, then the Nazis, then the Soviets. An excellent student, Rovt attended the Lvov State University of Trade and Economics and studied business, later receiving a Ph.D. there in international economics. That helped him land a job in Hungary, where he worked for a high-end resort.

It also helped him secure a work visa to the U.S. in 1984, by which time he was a Hungarian citizen. Once in New York City, Rovt worked at his uncle’s deli, then his cousins’ jewelry business. But he found his forte in fertilizer trading at IBE Trade, drawing on his contacts back in the USSR. After slowly gaining control of the private company, Rovt got into the business of producing fertilizer and started buying factories in Ukraine and Russia. “He did it with patience,” says Steven Plotnick, IBE’s president and a colleague for 15-plus years.

Patience, along with considerable capital and a passion for detail, has been an important building block of his latest empire: real estate. A guy who grew up with nothing, Rovt certainly appreciates the solidity of bricks and mortar; he has never bought a share of stock or a bond. “New York is the real capital of the world; therefore, real estate will always be here,” he says. Most of the 35 properties he owns are in the Big Apple. And he pays cash for them.

Some of the apartment buildings and multifamily dwellings form a portfolio that his two sons, Philip, 33, and Maxwell, 24, will eventually inherit, along with a nice rental income. They’re now helping develop and manage the buildings under the tutelage of a couple of investing partners who are long-time family acquaintances.

But the 1925 town house is Rovt’s plaything.
It once belonged to Rocky Aoki, the late founder of the Benihana res-taurant chain, who let it go for $4.7 million in September 2005. “I did not buy this to turn around and sell it,” Rovt says. He knew he wanted the place—and he knew exactly how he wanted to refurbish it, with the help of his wife, Olga. At first, though, he refused to tour it with her, or even cross the threshold. “My wife said, ‘You don’t want to come in?’ I said, ‘No, because if I buy it, I won’t keep this house; I will knock it down and build from scratch.’ ”